How to build a research assistant
Free blueprint for a research assistant. A low-code, single-agent, cloud-hosted stack with 12 connected components. Built around Elicit, NotebookLM, Tavily, Firecrawl. Copy it, export it, or change the answers to fit your project.
Research assistant
A low-code, single-agent, cloud-hosted stack with 12 connected components.
Architecture map
Tap a component to see its connections
Swipe sideways to see the whole map
Tool configuration
Interface & triggers
Chat interface
Where people talk to the agent
Web chat widgetor Slack or Teams bot
Orchestration
Visual agent canvas
Drag-and-drop agent loop you can extend
Flowiseor Langflow, Dify
Reasoning
Reasoning model
Reads very long documents in one go
Geminior Claude, ChatGPT / OpenAI
Memory & knowledge
Conversation memory
Keeps track of the current chat or task
Built into your orchestratorDocument ingestion
Splits and indexes your files and pages
Built-in knowledge baseor Firecrawl, LlamaIndex
Vector database
Finds the most relevant passages for each question
Pineconeor Weaviate, Qdrant
Tools & integrations
Web search
Fetches fresh facts from the live web
Tavilyor Exa, Perplexity
Browsing & scraping
Reads and acts on websites
Firecrawlor Browse AI, Browserbase
Docs & wikis
Reads and writes team documents
Notionor Google Drive, Confluence
Academic papers
Finds and summarises peer-reviewed research
Elicitor Consensus, Scite
Source notebook
Answers questions only from the sources you add
NotebookLMor ChatPDF
Monitoring & safety
Tracing & evaluation
Records every step, cost and answer quality
Langfuseor LangSmith, Weights & Biases
Set up your agent, step by step
Tick each step as you finish it. Your progress is saved with this plan in your AItooling account.
0 of 19 done
AItooling never signs up for you and never asks for your passwords or keys. You create each account yourself on the tool's own website, and only your ticks are saved here.
Sign in and save this plan to keep your progress in your account.
1Create your accounts
Sign up or install it, then make a new project for this agent.
Sign up, create an API key and set a monthly spending limit before anything else.
Sign up and create a new database or index just for this agent.
Sign up and connect only the apps this agent needs, with read-only access where you can.
Sign up and connect only the apps this agent needs, with read-only access where you can.
Sign up and connect only the apps this agent needs, with read-only access where you can.
Sign up and connect only the apps this agent needs, with read-only access where you can.
Sign up and connect only the apps this agent needs, with read-only access where you can.
Sign up and turn on logging so you can review what the agent does.
2Build it in this order
3Launch your agent
Copy the ready-made code for this agent. It hides secrets and personal data before the AI model sees them.
Put each key in a password manager or your hosting's secret settings. Never paste keys or passwords into AItooling or a chat.
Start small, read every answer yourself, and only then let other people use it.
Want to go deeper?
Read our step-by-step guides on building agents. Browse guides